Focus of Raoul Moat investigation turns on police

Questions begin over how Northumbria police force handled Moat, his friends, the media and public

Police apologised for the live broadcast of the contents a card, pictured in the envelope, in which two girls thanks the force for its efforts to catch Moat, who they described as 'a nutter'. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

The voice was chilling. For four hours Raoul Moat spoke into a Dictaphone and railed against the hand that fate had dealt him. Seething with anger he declared that the rules had changed. People were going to suffer – now it was not just the police who were in his sights.

Detectives found the Dictaphone when they came across Moat's makeshift campsite in woodland on Wednesday. It was clear from its contents that Moat had wanted it to be found, one of a series of communications with detectives that provide a disturbing insight into his state of mind in the days before he killed himself.

Evidently Moat had been reading his own press and was furious at the way the media was portraying him. Comments made by Moat's mother, Josephine Healey, who had little contact with Moat during the past 18 years, that her son "would be better off dead" are thought to have been among the remarks that upset him.

"For every piece of inaccurate information published I will select a member of the public and kill them," the 37-year-old bodybuilder pledged.

As part of a warped game of cat and mouse, Moat promised to ring the police and give them prior warning before killing his next victim. "I am no Derrick Bird," he said referring to the serial killer who shot dead 12 people in Cumbria last month. "I won't be shooting old ladies in their bobble hats."

Nevertheless, the tape signalled Moat harboured murderous grudges not just against the police but the wider public, something that caused consternation among detectives leading the hunt for Britain's most wanted man. Psychologists who listened to the tape concluded there was a "high risk" that Moat would be responsible for future violence.

A sign of the police's heightened anxiety came on Thursday evening when officers briefed residents in Rothbury, the pleasant market town in Northumberland that had become the centre of their hunt for Moat.

Temporary chief constable, Sue Sim, told the 200-strong group of residents packed into the town's Jubilee Hall, that intelligence indicated there may be a threat to the wider public.

Concerned that further negative news reports could anger Moat, police requested a news blackout relating to his private life. They also asked for stories already published about Moat's personal life to be removed from news websites. It was an almost impossible request, given how the manhunt had developed into a real-life Truman Show with every development tracked around the world in blogs, on websites and mobile networking sites like Twitter.

"We have taken advice from a consultant forensic psychologist," said Denise Aubrey, director of legal services for Northumbria police, in a letter to editors. "It is clear that Mr Moat's rules have changed and that he is getting angrier.

"We are in the unique situation where we know there is a real risk to members of the public – it is not random – but nonetheless we cannot identify who those individuals may turn out to be."

Earlier, Detective Chief Superintendent Neil Adamson briefed reporters off the record. "We recovered a Dictaphone with four hours of ramblings from somebody," Adamson said. "We don't think it is a decoy, but we're not absolutely sure. We are sure it has been made within one or two days of the shootings and the print coverage has really made him upset. There is talk of people who are being spoken to not being right and its winding him up."

The blackout request was the second made by the force within days. Earlier in the week, fearing Moat had taken two hostages, police requested another news shutdown. That was lifted when the pair were charged in connection with the inquiry.

A view that the force were treading on eggshells, desperate not to offend Moat, was confirmed when they apologised for calling Moat "a nutter".

Neighbourhood inspector Sue Peart had read out a card from two schoolgirls thanking the force for its efforts in catching Moat whom they described as a "nutter". Peart had intended to demonstrate to her fellow officers that the public appreciated their efforts to catch Moat, but the move backfired.

In a statement the force said: "An officer from Northumbria police inadvertently read out the contents of two cards from local young people during a briefing to officers which was broadcast live. This should not have happened and Northumbria police wish to take this opportunity to offer an immediate apology to the public."

It was not the first time the force's actions surrounding the hunt had come under scrutiny. Nor will it be the last.

Moat was freed from Durham prison on Thursday 1 July after serving time for assaulting a nine-year-old child. He had told prison officers and inmates he had nothing left to live for after receiving a call two days before his release in which he learned that his six-year, on-off relationship with Samantha Stobbart, 22, the mother of his youngest child, was over.

The prison authorities were so concerned they warned Northumbria police that Moat was a potential risk to Stobbart.

Within hours of being released, Moat posted an update on his Facebook page that read: "Just got out of jail, I've lost everything, my business, my property and to top it all off my lass of six years has gone off with someone else. I'm not 21 and I can't rebuild my life. Watch and see what happens." Later he used the site to taunt police, writing: "Ha, Ha! You can come but you can't catch me!"

CCTV footage of Moat shopping in Newcastle shortly after his release shows him sporting a new, distinctive Mohican-style haircut, similar to the violent character Travis Bickle in the film Taxi Driver.

Perhaps the look was intentonal. Moat was certainly prone to violence. Relatives of Stobbart described him as a vain man who displayed aggressive outbursts and erratic behaviour.

Kelly Stobbart, Samantha's half-sister, said: "He always said that if he couldn't have her, no one else would" and claimed Moat was addicted to steroids.

Moat, too, in a letter sent to police acknowledged the depths of his anger. "It's like The Hulk, it takes over and it's more than anger and it happens only when I'm hurt, and this time I was really hurt."

Born in 1973, Moat was brought up by his grandmother in Newcastle's West End. His mother lived nearby but suffered from mental health problems and he saw little of her. Moat left home at 24 and lost contact with her.

Moat was known to police before he was jailed for assault earlier this year. According to "soft intelligence" held on police files, Moat, who had worked as a bouncer in Newcastle clubs, had been arrested 12 times between 2000 and 2010.

He first attacted attention when arrested for conspiracy to murder in 2000. The details are sketchy but it is believed to have involved a shooting connected to the Newcastle drugs scene. Moat was released without charge.

In 2005, Moat appeared in court charged with possessing a knuckle-duster and a samurai sword. He told the court: "The point of a knuckle-duster is as much to protect your knuckles as it is to damage the other kid. The way you use a knuckle-duster is you clench it in your hand so that the metal presses in the palm of your hand."

Moat was acquitted of both charges.

"The hard intelligence and the soft intelligence just don't match up," said Harry Fletcher, assistant general secretary of the probation union, Napo. "You would expect someone like Moat who was capable of such violence to have a significant number of convictions, but he doesn't."

Given the number of times he was arrested but never convicted there has been speculation that Moat had at some time been a police informer, although there is no evidence of this.

There are suggestions he was a bit-part player in the Newcastle underworld. Certainly his position as a bouncer would have allowed him to control the drugs entering clubs. "He might have been used to carry messages, that sort of thing, but he was not a Mr Big. He was just a typical north-east macho man," said one person familiar with his background.

Moat's numerous arrests and subsequent release without charge may have triggered his hatred for the police; a hatred that boiled over when he was led to mistakenly believe that Stobbart was seeing a police officer.

She had pretended her new lover, Chris Brown, was in the force in the hope that Moat would leave them alone when he left prison. But Brown, a karate expert who moved north from the Thames valley to start a new life, had never been in the force.

Today his family expressed their anger that despite the warnings from Durham prison, Moat was free to shoot dead their son just two days after his release, having lain in wait for the pair. Brown was shot in the head after Moat blasted Stobbart in the stomach through the living room window of a house in Gateshead early on Saturday morning.

Brown's sister, Beckie Njie, said there were failings from the moment Moat was released after serving his 18-week sentence. "We've got a lot of unanswered questions," she said. "We are really angry and we want answers. Something went wrong and it has cost Chris his life. They should have warned them. How did they allow that to happen when they knew he [Moat] was a danger?"

The focus now is shifting to Northumbria police, already the subject of two Independent Police Complaints Commission investigations over the way it handled Moat's release and his subsequent manhunt.

One question is over the failied opportunities to find Moat sooner, notably by placing under surveillance some of his closest friends. The evening after the Gateshead shootings, Moat turned up at the home of his friend Andy Mcallister to give "his side of the story".

Astonishingly, Moat then went back to Mcallister's house early on Monday morning to deliver a 49-page confession, having shot PC David Rathband as he sat in his patrol car on Sunday morning, apparently at random.

"They knew he had been to my house once – I would have thought they would have been watching," Mcallister said.

As the hunt for Moat intensified police imposed an exclusion zone around Rothbury, having discovered his abandoned black Lexus in the town. Farmer Graham Noble said the car had been parked there for a day but residents did not know its significance until police appealed for information as to it whereabouts.

Equally perplexing is the failure to spot Moat earlier. Despite what was described as a "ring of steel" around Rothbury and a manhunt involving officers from 15 forces, there were several apparent sightings of Moat wandering in the vicinity of the town in the days before he shot himself.

There is even a suggestion Moat walked through the centre of Rothbury. A member of the public claimed to have spotted him earlier in the week just hours after Sim had told a packed public meeting that Moat was unlikely to be "walking down the street with a gun".

Compounding the sense of farce was a collision involving two police cars speeding to the riverside on Friday evening shortly after Moat had been sighted.

The local MP, Sir Alan Beith, who chairs the justice committee, expressed his own reservations about the search shortly before Moat was discovered.

"I think questions can be more appropriately asked when there is time to think about them," he said.

The hunt seems to have followed a pattern common to major police investigations down the years. While armed officers, dogs, helicopters and special forces swept rural areas looking for their quarry, the police used the media to bring in Britain's most wanted man via a less confrontational means: psychology.

At one stage they read out a statement from Stobbart urging: "Give yourself up. If you still love me and our baby you would not be doing this."

Moat's uncle, Charlie Alexander, pledged on television: "If he would get in touch I would be prepared to meet him."

This approach mimics that used by the Yorkshire force investigating the murders of 13 women between 1975 and 1980 by Peter Sutcliffe.

When Sutcliffe moved from killing prostitutes to a 16-year-old shop assistant, Assistant Chief Constable Jim Hobson launched an extraordinary and controversial appeal to the Yorkshire Ripper. "The Ripper is now killing innocent girls," Hobson said. "This indicates your mental state and that you are in urgent need of medical attention. You have made your point. Now give yourself up."

A similar approach was adopted in the hunt for Mark Hobson, the binman who murdered twins Claire and Diane Sanderson and pensioners James and Joan Britton in Yorkshire in 2004. After the murders, Hobson, who had been seen studying an SAS survival guide in the days before the twins' bodies were found, spent six days living in a ditch under a hedge.

During that time his mother, Sandra, and his ex-wife Kay made appeals for him to surrender.

But such an approach is not without risks. "It can backfire," said Phillip Hodson, the psychotherapist and broadcaster. "If you are a paranoid individual anybody not for you is against you."

Paranoid, brimming with anger, Moat had no one left to turn to as the net tightened around him.

He would have seen that the police had already charged two of his alleged accomplices, Karl Ness, 26, and Qhuram Awan, 23, with conspiracy to commit murder and possessing a firearm with intent. Three men and a woman had also been arrested in connection with the hunt.

But what was different from the hunt for the Ripper and even Hobson was that the media landscape had changed. In a world of 24-hour rolling news, Twitter feeds and blogs, Moat had become a valuable commodity, his actions tracked by millions. A significant number were even sympathetic to his situation. Others expressed reluctant admiration that he had evaded capture for so long.

As one poster on Twitter put it: "I see Raoul Moat has got his own TV show. The News."

In the final hours of his life, Moat achieved the recognition and respect he so desperately craved even if, pinned down by snipers, he was no longer able to read his own press. "He has been converted into a potential celebrity," Hodson said. "A kind of mythology can build up around these characters. Someone somewhere must already be thinking about the movie."